Linguistic Society of America

THE INSCRIPTION OF DVENOS
paretti,40 E. W. Fay,41 and now Goldmann,42 make the division at
this point. In my opinion, there is only one interpretation of this phrase
which is at all satisfactory, that of Ehrlich:43 MANO is a genitive plural,
a euphemistic term for ghosts of the dead, for the archaic adjective
madnus= bonus is adequately attested, and appears with another suffix
in Manes Mdnium; and MEINOM is equivalent in meaning to munus
(older *moinos), but has a different ablaut grade in the root and a
slightly different suffix. Thus he interprets in Manium munLus 'as a
gift to the Manes'. I should alter this to 'as a gift to the Deities of
Hell', understanding these deities as the three gods of the first line.
Accordingly 'Duenos made me as a gift to the Deities of Hell; to
Duenos let no evil arise through me.' But who or what is Duenos?
The word may be a personal name, for there was a praenomen Bennus
and a gentilicium Duennius or Bennius;44yet this was in any instance a
rare name. On the other hand, DVENOS may be a mere descriptive
adjective, = bonus, of which, if the nasal be not for the doubled nasal, it
is certainly an older collateral form. In view of the rarity of the name
Bennus and of the possibility that the execrator might desire to disguise
his identity, I incline to the view that DVENOS is bonus 'a good man',
uttered in earnest and not as a euphemism. It is likely that the loss of
mdnus 'good' in the language was due to its extensive use as a euphemism,
especially in the derivative Manes, so that it lost its original meaning
and its place was usurped by bonus. At the same time, there is a distinct
possibility that in this third line, as well as in the first line, the initial
word was written with a double value, DVENOS DVENOS 'Bennus, a
good man'; though I do not insist that the actual name was Bennus, but
was near enough in sound to DVENOS to give some appropriateness to
the graphic representation. Whether or not this be so, the word denotes
the execrator, either (as we shall later see) a private individual cursing a
personal enemy, or a priest cursing a person who in some way has sinned
against the deity served by the priest. It seems unlikely that F. D.
Allen45 is right in taking it to refer to a professional sorcerer who cast the
spell; even less likely is it that it denotes the potter who made the vase,
40 Museo ital. di antichitd classica 1. 175 ff. [1885].
41 AJP 30. 121-38 [1909].
42 Op. cit. 120.
43 Untersuchungen iuber die Natur der griechischen Betonung 72, Berlin, 1912.
u Cf. H. Jordan, Hermes 16. 237-8 [1881]; W. Deecke, RvhM 37. 385-6 [1882]; W.
Schuize, Zur Geschichte lateinischer Eigennamen 423, 519, Berlin, 1904; A. Zimmermann,
Philologus 72. 158 [1913].
4 Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 9. 53-4 [18981.
215